The kids are not all right — and that is from many students, parents and community workers in the City of Buffalo who are calling on the state legislature to pass the Judith S. Kaye Solutions Not Suspensions Act.
The bill includes eliminating suspensions for students from pre-kindergarten through third grade and incorporate restorative practices in school with regards to codes of conduct and overall the whole system of discipline to less punitive one.
The Buffalo Public School district is the epicenter of the suspension discussion.
Last school year there were over 7,700 out-of-school suspensions — over 1,400 of those were for six days or more.
Buffalo Academy for Visual and Performing Arts sophomore Serea Walker said instead of acting as a corrective measure to behavior suspensions disrupt student academic progress.
“Suspensions have never worked,” she said. "I don't think they ever will. There's so many other ways, productive ways that we could be dealing with situations like this. I feel as if this sets a child down a path that they may not return from.”
Walker has been in and out of class this year due to anxiety and other mental problems that are often compounded by a system of discipline that more often than not removes kids from class than works with them.
From the district’s own data dashboard, as many as one in six students was excluded during the 2021-22 school year — many times higher than comparable urban school districts across the state.
In December, students, parents and community workers called on the district to adopt the bill.
Jessica Bauer Walker is president of the Buffalo Public Schools Parent Community Health Worker Association and Serea’s mother.
She co-authored a paper analyzing suspensions in the district.
“We see that the majority of suspensions are for subjective behaviors like insubordination,” Bauer Walker said. “So there's this narrative out here that Buffalo Public Schools doesn't want to suspend students, but we know there's violent behaviors they have to keep other students safe, but only about 25% of suspensions fall into that category.”
Like Serea, Hutchinson Central Technical High School sophomore Rehma Kashindi said it is tough trying to achieve academically while internal and external traumas continue to go unaddressed.
“I don't make it to school as much,” she said. “My attendance is getting bad because it's very frustrating to walk into an environment that is consistently stressful and it feels like people don't care about you.”
District suspension rates also show disparities among who is getting suspended. Students with disabilities were suspended at almost two-times the rate of non-disabled students.
Students considered economically disadvantaged had suspension rates two and half times that of non-economically disadvantaged students, and Black students were suspended at a rate two and half times greater than white students.
We the Parents co-chair Sam Radford has been fighting this fight for what he said is going on 30 years.
“This is not a new issue,” he said. “As a matter of fact this issue is really life and death.”
The tragedy of 15-year old Jawaan Daniels stays on Radford’s conscience.
“He got caught up in the hallway sweep and got suspended for being in the hallway and got sent home,” he said of Daniels, who had a hall pass. “Nobody even called his parents. He got sent home and while he was standing at the bus stop he was shot and killed.”
Daniels’ 2010 murder is an extreme example of the suspension issue. But how many students — due to being suspended so often, just stop coming to school?
The district says suspensions are down, and that is true. But overall attendance is down from 2018-2019 through last year.
This month the New York State Safe Schools Task Force released their report on school discipline recommending the state legislature pass the Solutions not Suspensions bill.
District Superintendent Dr. Tonja Williams welcomes the opportunity to implement the education department’s recommendations.
“We always support what our New York State Education Department recommends,” she said.
Williams said the district is making progress in adapting a more restorative approach to discipline.
“We don't want to suspend students and kindergarten, first, second or third grade,” she said of the task force recommendations. “And our suspensions have greatly decreased as we've increased our restorative practice trainings our trauma informed care trainings we've increased the number of social workers and counselors that we have in schools.”
But even after a January Board of Education meeting where students impacted by suspensions acted out their experiences with bullying, suspensions and unjust discipline the students, including Kashindi, remain skeptical of the district’s intentions.
“Our whole thing wasn't to say, ‘Oh stop bullying,’ that wasn't the point,” she said. “It was to approach the students with a trauma-informed approach that was literally what we’re trying to get at.”
She says a more empathetic approach is needed.
“Just because not every student or most students are in a 31,000-student district we have to have bullying, like bullying just exists,” she said. “That's not the point. The point is to bring to light that that it may be happening, you don't know what's happening. So approach them in a way that's going to make them feel like humans.”
The view of these students and the community members and parents amplifying their voice is a shift away from suspensions is a cultural shift and it will take everyone; students, parents, faculty, the Board of Education to come together to advance this movement.
